I'm attempting to set up a magazine site, and finding myself completely confused by the whole sections vs. topics thing. This magazine has a fairly simple structure -- content is grouped into a few categories, like reviews, portfolios, features, etc. There are no subcategories.

At first I thought I was supposed to set them up as sections, but from what I can see, that requires that any content within a section be categorized by some kind of taxonomy vocabulary within it, and I don't want that. As I said, there are no subcategories in this magazine.

So I tried instead to set them as topics, within the existing "default" category, but that didn't work either. Apparently creating a topic doesn't actually allow you to name your own topic. When I clicked on the "Add topic" link next to the default section, it didn't give me anywhere to enter the name of a new topic. There was just a pop-up menu called "Topic" with two options in it, "advertisement" and "top stories", neither of which correspond to any topic/section/category I want to create. The description underneath that just says "The topic for this group of headlines", which really doesn't help (and I don't want a "group of headlines" anyway, I want to be able to categorize actual articles). I though the link was supposed to allow me to create a new topic, not just choose one of two existing ones!

What minimal documentation the modules has (i.e. the Read Me file) seems to suggest that you can actually create your own topics and/or sections, but creating topics doesn't seem to work, and creating sections doesn't seem to work unless you want lots of subcategories inside them.

Is there any way this module can actually be used to create a publication with just a single set of topics/sections/whatever that can be used to categorize content, without having to either make up a bunch of arbitrary subcategories that will never actually be used, or force everything into a couple of predefined topics that don't actually match your content?

*sigh* I'm supposed to have a first draft of this site up by tomorrow morning, which is increasingly looking like it's really not going to happen. I've got all the content -- I just need to be able to arrange it into a magazine format, which this module sounded like it was going to be perfect for. But in practice, it's just turning out to be a giant headache...

Any assistance in getting some idea of how the whole topic/section thing is actually supposed to work would be much appreciated.

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spidersilk’s picture

spidersilk commented
Title: Completely confused about topics and sections » Topic/section confusion, and articles disappearing when added to edition

OK, I finally figured out the topics vs. sections thing. For anyone else who may be confused, here's what to do, to the best of my current understanding, anyway:

1. Do not under any circumstances create more sections. The only one that will show up will be Default, no matter how many you try to create. Just create topics in the Default section.

2. You have to create your topics twice, and you can't start by doing the obvious and clicking "Add Topic", the way you might think. You have to go over to Taxonomy and create a vocabulary with all your topics there, and then come back to Epublish and create them all a second time, only this time it will actually let you - your topics will show up in the little pop-up I referred to in my original post. Yes, this is insane, but at least it appears to work.

However - having done that, I now have a new and different problem, and am modifying the title of this issue accordingly. I was finally, after about an hour and a half of experimenting, able to create my topics, and add the first article to the first edition of my magazine. The latter was even more frustrating than trying to set up the categories, if possible (for the record, you have to click on Edit Edition, then scroll down to the bottom where there is a tiny section called "Manage Headlines", and click on a button above it called "Add More Headlines").

But the real problem is... the article doesn't actually show up as part of that edition. When I go to Edit Edition, there are no articles listed under the Manage Headlines section, and if I go to the public page for that edition, nothing is listed there either. However, if I click on the Add More Headlines button, it no longer gives me the option of adding that article. It's as if it sort of halfway knows that article is part of the edition and halfway doesn't. I'm not sure if this is related to the section/topic confusion or not -- maybe because of all the hassles trying to get the section/topic thing sorted out, the article somehow got lost.

Any ideas on this would be appreciated -- in the meantime, I'll try poking around in phpMyAdmin and see if I can figure anything out that way.

spidersilk’s picture

spidersilk commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

Replying to my own topic a second time, because once again I eventually got it sorted out. I checked the epublish_edition_node table in phpMyAdmin, and the tid column was set to -1 for this article for some reason. So I looked up what the tid (taxonomy/term/topic ID) should be for it in the term_data table, and set it to that number instead, and voila, the article now shows up.

I'm closing the issue - sorry for posting when evidently I was able to figure it out on my own with a little more tinkering. I think I was just cranky and frustrated from stress and sleep deprivation. Well, at least hopefully the solutions I found will be helpful for anyone else who runs into the same problems.